


Like Oil on Snow

by Hinn_Raven



Series: TexBall - Gay and In Charge [1]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Injury, F/F, Felix Being a Dick, Hurt/Comfort, It's all off-Screen, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 11:00:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13145274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hinn_Raven/pseuds/Hinn_Raven
Summary: Tex offers herself up as a distraction to make sure that Kimball isn't captured. But Kimball has to listen as Tex is captured instead.





	Like Oil on Snow

**Author's Note:**

> Merry Christmas to my Secret Santa all-made-of-stardust! Have some TexBall hurt/comfort! Just generically slapped Tex into Chorus because canon-verse is always fun. Hope you enjoy!

Going to the Temple to find the sword-key-whatever was a risk. Kimball had known that when she had gone there. Felix and Locus were right on her tail, and she was separated from the others, except for Tex. Through her radio, she can hear Tucker trying to find her, but physically, she can hear Locus and Felix.

“We’re too far from the exit,” Tex says. “We won’t make it. We need to hide.”

“Hide _where_?” Kimball protests, before Tex grabs her suddenly and yanks her into a small side passage.

“Here,” she says. There’s a series of stalactites that nearly form a secondary wall. “ _Stay there_ ,” Tex shoves Kimball down, behind the jagged rises of stone. “Remember, I’m not human.”

“What the hell are you doing?” Kimball demands, her heart hammering in her ears. She can hear Felix and Locus behind them. The sword feels hot in her hands, a reminder of how close they are to losing everything.  

“Whatever you hear, _don’t move_ ,” Tex orders her. She yanks out a small, circular unit from the center of her armor, and presses it against Kimball’s chest. The gesture should be intimate, but it’s too abrupt to be anything but desperate. There’s a flick of a switch, and then Kimball looks down to see her own body missing in a faint shimmer. Tex’s invisibility unit, she realizes. “Got it?”

“What are you planning?”

“No time! Just stay there!”

Tex turns and runs away, but she doesn’t get very far.

There’s the sound of gun going off, and then a body hits the ground. Tex lets out a guttural sounding roar, and another gun goes off.

The sound of something snapping rings through the air with a loud and horrible crack, and Tex _yells_.

Kimball hears herself gasping, and mutes her helmet quickly so that Felix and Locus won’t hear her, trying not to shake. _She’s not human,_ she reminds herself. _She doesn’t feel pain like we do_.

“Well _you’re_ a sight for sore eyes, Texas!” Felix’s voice fills Kimball with a curdling sense of dread. She grips the sword tightly in her hands, imagining turning it on, and running Felix right through. It’s a stupid fantasy; they would kill her before she got close, and then she’d be dead, and they’d have the sword. But it makes her feel somewhat better.

“If she’s here, the general will be close by,” Locus’ voice used to haunt Kimball’s nightmares, before the war. She’d only seen him from a distance, but she’d heard his voice on the radio, demanding surrenders and the like. He’d been a perfect, if terrifying villain back then. Now, she’s not sure she was wrong.

He’s still haunting her nightmares, but Felix has joined him, now.

“Oh _Vanessa_!” Felix sings out. His voice echoes through the cave, making it impossible to tell how close or far away he is. Kimball twitches, half expecting to see him peering at her over the rock she’s hiding behind, ready with a knife in his hand. But he doesn’t appear. “ _Vanessa_! Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

The next noise that comes out of Tex is a scream.

 _It’s fake_ , Kimball tells herself, pulling her knees up to her chest. _She’s faking it._

“You like this one, don’t you Kimball?” Felix asks, his voice dangerously soft. But it still carries through the cave, and Kimball bites the inside of her cheek. The tone is almost teasing, almost familiar. It sounds like something he might have said when he worked for her, teasing her about a pretty soldier or something similar. But she knows now, the underlying threat in that voice. “Tell you what. If you come out now and give us the key, we’ll let her live.”

Kimball stifles a gasp. _They don’t know she’s a machine, they don’t know she’s a machine_ , she tells herself. She presses her forehead against her knees and tries not to listen as Tex yells again and again. Kimball knows how beatings sound like; it’s all fists and kicking right now, keeping Tex too much in pain to get up, to fight back. There’s the sound of armor hitting armor for a while, before Felix mixes it up.

“You know,” Felix says suddenly, and ice floods Kimball’s veins, half afraid he’s noticed that Tex’s skin is made of metal and carbon and fiberglass. “I wonder if a Freelancer is as much fun to cut up as Tucker— _fuck—”_

There’s a thud, and it’s Felix’s turn to let out a pained noise, and a gun goes off, and—

“Bitch!”

“Be more careful, Felix,” Locus reprimands.

“You scream like a five-year-old,” Tex’s laugh is strained. In Kimball’s mind, Locus’s boot is pressed against her helmet, pushing her into the snow.  

“Last chance, Kimball!” Felix yells. “I’m going to gut this bitch _slowly_ , you hear?”

“She’s not here, dumbass.” Tex sounds breathless, but smug. Kimball can just picture her grin, the same one she’d wear when she’s just been told off for kicking Caboose through a wall for sparring practice or for when she’d dumped a bucket of spiders on Washington or— “She’s _long gone_ by now. I knew you had to play with your food—”

One, two, three, four gunshots go off in quick succession, and Tex is cut off abruptly with a gurgle. Kimball bites her tongue so hard she tastes blood, her heart racing in her chest so hard she can feel it through her armor.

“ _Move_ ,” Locus says. “We need to catch up with her.”

“I’m telling you, she’s _here_!”

“Your own argument was that she would be unable to listen to Agent Texas suffer,” Locus snaps. “You have wasted time. There are no heat readings. _She is not here_.”

There’s a long, horrible pause. Kimball barely takes the time to be grateful that the invisibility unit apparently masks her heat signature. She hadn’t even stopped to consider such a thing.

“ _Fine_ ,” Felix says, in the most petulant tone. It was the one he’d used when he’d bickered with Tucker over the stupidest things. He sounds like a child, instead of the terrifying monster who might have just killed Tex while Kimball listened.

She wants nothing more than to throw the sword away from her, but she makes herself keep it close, cradling it against her chest. There’s the sound of footsteps fading away, moving into the distance.

Kimball forces herself to wait a full ten minutes before scrambling out from her hiding place. Felix and Locus don’t jump out and kill her on the spot, so she figures she waited long enough.

She looks around, trying to see what happened. The first thing she sees is how the color red stains the snowy floor of the cave.

 _It’s oil, not blood,_ she tells herself. It’s some sort of trick that Texas is using; Kimball remembers overhearing a conversation between Tex and Grey about Tex’s robot body.

Tex lies in an undignified heap on the ground, where they’d thrown her aside. As if she’s _trash_. There’s a discarded gun lying on the ground next to her, emptied of bullets after Locus or Felix had shot Tex. Kimball lunges forward, her heart hammering in her chest, half afraid of what she’s going to find.

There’s no signs of life in the body as Kimball rips off the helmet, exposing Tex’s android face. There’s marks on it, from when her helmet and visor had been hit, but nothing too serious marring it. It’s the rest of her body that’s riddled in bullet holes, her arm hanging at an awkward angle, as if broken. The electric blue eyes are staring open, lifelessly and Kimball can’t help herself, a sob breaking out of her throat.  

“You should have stayed hidden,” a voice says behind her, and Kimball yelps and drops Tex’s body as a floating white ghostly form appears behind her.

It’s Tex; it can’t be anyone else. Kimball would know that body language anywhere, the curve of the ancient armor. The ghost moves forward, settling down into the body. Suddenly, Tex sits up, her body still awkwardly in Kimball’s arms.

“Tex,” Kimball breathes. The knot of tension in her chest loosens somewhat; she’s never seen Tex’s A.I. form before, but she knows what one looks like because of Epsilon, and it’s not too hard to put the pieces together. That was how Tex had fooled them. She had shut down her robotic body by leaving, and that had eliminated any potential life signs that Felix and Locus would have checked for.

Tex hadn’t died because of her, hadn’t died to protect Kimball and the sword, to stop Felix and Locus from killing her entire planet. Kimball half wants to laugh, half wants to cry. They’ve _won_ this round.

“Aw, were you worried?” Tex laughs, pulling herself up further, until she’s on her knees, facing Kimball. The mechanical rise and fall of Tex’s chest sounds labored, and Kimball tries not to think about the damage done to Tex’s body. Even if it didn’t kill her… she thinks she can hear the whir of fan blades and the scratch of gears.

“Yes!” Kimball snaps, fingers digging into Tex’s shoulders. _God_ , there are still bullet holes in her armor, the red-tinted oil making the armor slick. It shouldn’t look so similar to blood, and yet… it was enough to fool Felix.

Tex’s face flickers with emotion. Her eyes soften slightly, and she reaches out to cup Kimball’s face in an armored hand. Kimball leans into it unthinkingly, even though the hand is streaked with the fake blood.

“I’m not human, remember?” Tex says, surprisingly soft. “I’ve survived worse than this.”

Kimball pulls back. “That doesn’t make it _okay_ ,” she says, her voice trembling. “I heard—I _know_ you feel pain!”

“Not the same way,” Tex says, overly patient, as if she thinks that Kimball is being ridiculous, and Kimball _hates that_ , hates the way that Tex downplays her own suffering, because she knows better. “I’ll be _fine_.”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Kimball snaps. She thinks she can still hear the sounds, and her mind is starting to match the noises she’d heard with Tex’s marks. And as far as Felix and Locus had been concerned, they’d just done that to a _human_. Her stomach twists and lurches inside of her, and Kimball tastes bile. She swallows it down; she _can’t_ puke in front of Tex. “Just… don’t.”

Tex reaches out, and grabs Kimball’s helmet, pressing the catches to get it to release. She tosses it to the side, where it lands besides Tex’s own helmet in the fake-bloodied snow.

“I’m fine. You’re fine. That’s what matters,” Tex says, her thumb brushing against Kimball’s cheek. It’s only then that Kimball realizes that there’s dampness there, and that Tex is brushing away the tears that have been gathering on her face since… Kimball isn’t even sure how long she’d been crying.

“Don’t do that again,” Kimball tries to order, but her voice is still shaking. _She’s_ shaking as the adrenaline and fear drains away, just leaving her exhausted and scared. All she wants to do is curl up into a ball and cry, but there’s no _time;_ she needs to get the sword to safety, she needs to—

Tex leans forward, pressing her forehead against hers, and Kimball’s breath catches in her chest. Her arms wrap around Kimball, pulling them closer into a tight embrace that’s shockingly intimate, despite the armor they’re both still wearing.

“It’s okay,” Tex whispers, almost gently, almost kindly, and before Kimball can even have time to marvel at this strangeness—at the tender way that Tex is cradling her face in her hands, at the soft pressure of Tex’s forehead against her own—Tex kisses her.

Kimball doesn’t even hesitate before kissing back ferociously, her own hands cradling Tex’s face; scarred, damaged, but _alive_ , and just focuses on that, of the humming of Tex’s mechanical body beneath her fingertips, of the taste of metal that Tex’s kisses carry, the press of lips and teeth and tongue as they fall into each other.

Finally, the need to breathe pulls them apart, and Kimball presses her forehead back against Tex’s.

Her heart is still racing, but there’s a faint giddiness to it, pushing aside the grim horror that has been hanging over her.

“We need to get the sword back,” she whispers. “We need to—to hide it, and then we need to destroy that temple, and—”

“In a moment,” Tex says, brushing Kimball’s cheek with her thumb again. “Let’s just… take a moment to breathe, okay?”

“Right,” Kimball says.

And then she kisses Tex again, the two of them still kneeling in the snow.


End file.
